So, what can I tell you now that all the stats, sales figures and goal achievements are in and correlated? Well, I still like cats …

Any old excuse to show a cute photo of cats. I have a Facebook mind! But I think I’ll put a picture of a cat in every income report from now on – it’ll make them easier to find through the thumbnail images on the archive pages!

My passive income

My target for the fourth quarter of 2012 was an ambitious $3,500. Here’s how I did (spoiler: badly). My passive income for these reports is divided into two sections: product sales and affiliate sales.

Sales of my products

I have two e-books:

How To Get Clients my first e-book which I think is good but stubbornly doesn’t sell that well.

Bugger! However, I wouldn’t have noticed this reduction in product profits without doing these quarterly reports. Time to create a new product, methinks! See more below! 😉

Affiliate commissions

Affiliate commissions can be earned where a special type of hyperlink on your site is clicked to a product seller’s site and a purchase is made. As you can see, I’ve made some money from Genesis – a WordPress theme, WPML – a WordPress plugin and iContact – an email delivery service, to name but three.

Calculating affiliate profits can be quite difficult as they all have different schemes and some of the affiliate CMSs leave a lot to be desired! I’m making excuses here because I might have made a few errors in the calculation of the 2012 Q3 figures. I think $715 from Bluehost was far too much and I don’t know where I got that from!

Totals

So, if you add my income from sales of my e-books this quarter, $607.33, together with income from affiliate sales, $2003.70, you get a total of $2611.03. This is under my ambitious target of $3,500.

Passive Income Annual Total!

Adding up all my e-book sales and affiliate sales gives you the following passive income totals for 2012:

E-book sales 2012

Affiliate commissions 2012

Total passive income 2012

$2,636.24

$6,916.76

$8,553

Not bad, considering my passive income for the previous year was only around $1,000!

Business report

OK. So much for hard and fast figures. Now here’s the bit where I ask myself what exactly have I achieved in these last three months?

Create a video course.✔ Target Achieved! I’ve set up Creating a Business Website course on Udemy which is available for free. This was to pre-empt a paid-for course I hope to be starting shortly!

I have to admit that I was fairly sure I would achieve these goals as I’d already done some of the work. I have chosen a much harder target for the next three month (see below).

Specific business targets

Here are my specific targets that I set three months ago and more targets for three months’ time.

Target

Q4 2012 target

Q4 2012 actual

Q1 2013 target

Passive Income

$3,500

$2447.10

$3,000

Monthly unique visitors

55,000

59,500

50,000

Number of guest posts published

4

3

6

I’m going to go through these now, one by one, and explain my thinking behind them.

My passive income target was probably too ambitious. It stubbornly stayed at around two and a half grand. So $3,000 will still be difficult next time. XTarget Missed!

Secondly, monthly unique visitors, I get a ridiculous amount of traffic towards the end of the year for my calendars. This is why my Q1 2013 target is lower than the actual number for Q4 2012. That’s going to be difficult. ✔ Target Achieved!

Thirdly, number of guest posts published, this is something that I can do relatively easily but I don’t do enough because I’m a lazy arse. Can do better! XTarget Missed!

Mixed results. And, possibly, showing us that it’s getting harder to grow an audience due to the amount of competition. There was a reduction or at least a levelling off in the increase in my Facebook Fans and subscribers. And, my Twitter followers actually went down! This was because I unfollowed a load of people!

Business targets for next year

More than anything, I want to create a successful product at a higher price point than my two e-books. I’m sure this is possible. I know there is a market and I know I can create something of value.

I really hope in the next three months I can create a video course at RunningAWebDesignBusiness.com. The information will go into more detail than the e-books. I plan to create a professional business website “live” on video and go in much more detail about how to get good web design clients and run a healthy business for my fellow designers.

So, hold me to it!

Personal targets for 2013

I don’t want to only strive to make more money next year because, as we all know, money isn’t everything. I’m interested in helping people, whether it’s giving advice about business or graphic design for free or doing voluntary work in the community, and I hope to be doing more of this in 2013.

It was great to run my business while on holiday in Brazil and I hope to go to Thailand soon for a much longer period. I’m not quite sure when though. But, travelling will be a big part of 2013 with any luck. And furthermore, I need to get back into taking exercise (hitting the gym and doing my T’ai Chi as much as possible from now on!)

More income reports

Do you like to read about how much money other people are making? I do. Here are a list of some of my favorite bloggers’ income reports (without mentioning Pat Flynn who’s too obvious):

Great read Rob, it’s always interesting to catch up on how you’re doing.

Traveling is something I definitely hope to do more of this year as well, particularly as the weather is so miserable in the UK. You can grab your laptop and work anywhere so you might as well make the most of it!

I’ve also got a site to add to your list of bloggers that discuss their passive income if that’s ok?

Hey Mark, thanks a lot. Yes, this time of year in the UK is always a little bleak weather-wise. I look forward to hearing about your travels!

Yes, thanks for putting me on to Matthew Woodward, he does seem interesting and I’d never heard of him. Will check him out over the coming weeks/months. I always think that there aren’t many good Brit bloggers when you consider how many good Australian ones there seem to be (and US, of course).